Interpersonal communication is a fundamental part of human society. Historically significant developments in the area of interpersonal communication include the invention of the telegraph, the invention of the telephone, and the realization of interpersonal communication over data connections, often via the Internet. The continuing proliferation of personal communication devices such as cellphones, smartphones, tablets, head-mounted displays (HMDs), and the like has only furthered the ways in which and the extent to which people communicate with one another, both in one-to-one communication sessions and in one-to-many and many-to-many conference communication sessions (i.e., sessions that involve three or more endpoints).
Further developments have occurred in which both visible-light-image (e.g., color-image) and depth-image data is captured (perhaps as part of capturing sequences of video frames) and combined in ways that allow extractions from two-dimensional (2D) video of “personas” wherein the remainder of the visible portion of video frames, such as the background outside of the outline of the person has been removed. Persona extraction, or “user extraction” is accordingly also known as “background removal” and by other names. In some implementations, an extracted persona is partially overlaid, typically on a pixel-wise basis, over a different background, video stream, slide presentation, and/or the like.
The following U.S. Patents and U.S. Patent Application Publications relate in various ways to persona extraction and associated technologies. Each of them is hereby incorporated herein by reference in its respective entirety.                U.S. Pat. No. 9,628,722, issued Apr. 18, 2017 and entitled “Systems and Methods for Embedding a Foreground Video into a Background Feed Based on a Control Input;”        U.S. Pat. No. 8,818,028, issued Aug. 26, 2014 and entitled “Systems and Methods for Accurate User Foreground Video Extraction;”        U.S. Pat. No. 9,053,573, issued Jun. 9, 2015 and entitled “Systems and Methods for Generating a Virtual Camera Viewpoint for an Image;”        U.S. Pat. No. 9,008,457, issued Apr. 14, 2015 and entitled “Systems and Methods for Illumination Correction of an Image;”        U.S. Pat. No. 9,300,946, issued Mar. 29, 2016 and entitled “System and Method for Generating a Depth Map and Fusing Images from a Camera Array;”        U.S. Pat. No. 9,055,186, issued Jun. 9, 2015 and entitled “Systems and Methods for Integrating User Personas with Content During Video Conferencing;”        U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 2015/0172069, published Jun. 18, 2015 and entitled “Integrating User Personas with Chat Sessions;”        U.S. Pat. No. 9,386,303, issued Jul. 5, 2016 and entitled “Transmitting Video and Sharing Content via a Network Using Multiple Encoding Techniques;”        U.S. Pat. No. 9,414,016, issued Aug. 9, 2016 and entitled “System and Methods for Persona Identification Using Combined Probability Maps;”        U.S. Pat. No. 9,485,433, issued Nov. 1, 2016 and entitled “Systems and Methods for Iterative Adjustment of Video-Capture Settings Based on Identified Persona;”        U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 2015/0188970, published Jul. 2, 2015 and entitled “Methods and Systems for Presenting Personas According to a Common Cross-Client Configuration;”        U.S. Pat. No. 8,649,592, issued Feb. 11, 2014 and entitled “System for Background Subtraction with 3D Camera;”        U.S. Pat. No. 8,643,701, issued Feb. 4, 2014 and entitled “System for Executing 3D Propagation for Depth Image-Based Rendering;”        U.S. Pat. No. 9,671,931, issued Jun. 6, 2017 and entitled “Methods and Systems for Visually Deemphasizing a Displayed Persona;”        U.S. Pat. No. 9,607,397, issued Mar. 28, 2017 and entitled “Methods and Systems for Generating a User-Hair-Color Model;”        U.S. Pat. No. 9,563,962, issued Feb. 7, 2017 and entitled “Methods and Systems for Assigning Pixels Distance-Cost Values using a Flood Fill Technique;”        U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 2016/0343148, published Nov. 24, 2016 and entitled “Methods and Systems for Identifying Background in Video Data Using Geometric Primitives;”        U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 2016/0353080, published Dec. 1, 2016 and entitled “Methods and Systems for Classifying Pixels as Foreground Using Both Short-Range Depth Data and Long-Range Depth Data;”        unpublished U.S. patent application Ser. No. 15/181,653, filed Jun. 14, 2016 and entitled “Methods and Systems for Combining Foreground Video and Background Video Using Chromatic Matching;” and        unpublished U.S. patent application Ser. No. 15/333,623, filed Oct. 25, 2016 and entitled “Methods and Systems for Real-Time User Extraction Using Deep Learning Networks.”        